Research shows that users are more likely to become heavy contributors to Twitter’s micro-blogging service around nine months after they first join the service, after something of a lull around the three to six month period.

The stats really tell an interesting story about Twitter's growth...

According to data released by the folks at research firm Sysomos, the pattern is one that’s only reinforcing itself as time goes by; users join Twitter, are quite active, then their usage drops off for three months or so before rallying and rising dramatically around the time they’ve been using the service for nine months. It certainly provides some interesting statistics for the folks at Twitter to mull over.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see that those who manage to stuck around for the duration of nine months seem to really weigh in in a big way. The research from Sysomos indicates that around the nine month mark, users ‘increased their activity in a major way,’ bringing them up to 41.6% of total tweets… not bad, considering that in December those users were contributing just 26% of the total.

The other big take home from this seems to be that, as Twitter grows, its populations average time using Twitter is growing too. While this might not be surprising, the fact that users who’ve been around more than nine months are contributing so much could well be taken as an indication that Twitter’s growth has slowed, as much as anything else.

Indeed, this much is confirmed by Sysomos’ own trend for Twitter growth, which indicates that growth has been slowing down over the last three months… Still, it seems that all Twitter needs to pick up users is a global news event, so who knows what might buck the trend this time around.